New Left and the (next) new conjuncture.

Just finished reading Hall's account of what he calls the "first new left" (and the first "New Left Review" which is to say the NLR before Perry Anderson took over.) I am struck by several things but most centrally, I notice a certain amount of anxiety about how a socialist movement can arise in the midst of basic material affluence. Pace,

We also challenged the prevailing view that the so-called affluent society would of itself erode the appeal of socialist propaganda—that socialism could arise only out of immiseration and degradation. Our emphasis on people taking action for themselves, ‘building socialism from below’ and ‘in the here and now’, not waiting for some abstract Revolution to transform everything in the twinkling of an eye, proved, in the light of the re-emergence of these themes after 1968, strikingly prefigurative.

In other words, the orthodox Marxist claim that the only thing that might help push the revolution along was a dramatic material change seemed like an unlikely engine for social change at the time . As he says elsewhere in the article, "socialism was a conscious democratic movement and socialists were made, not born or given by the inevitable laws of history or the objective processes of the mode of production alone." On the one hand, the politics this inspired were quite important--in ways that I've not before heard. He writes of project of creating NLR clubs around Britain in order to engage people "where they were" and get conversations going about socialism, etc. They weren't alone, of course, in doing this and it's not entirely contextualized, but there is a real attention to politically engaging "the people" and getting them interested in these ideas and their importance for social change. In practice, this meant opening the conversations more and getting people engaged in the discussion rather than giving a top down proscription of what the discussion should look like--or such was Hall's ideal. While he draws a distinction between himself and Thompson earlier in the essay, by the end it is clear that, in terms of how he understood socialist activism at the time, he was also deeply inspired by Thompson's work on William Morris (presaging his work in Making of the Working Class). He quotes from his editorial in the first issue of NLR:

We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there. We have come through 200 years of capitalism and 100 years of imperialism. Why should people—naturally—turn to socialism? There is no law which says that the Labour Movement, like a great inhuman engine, is going to throb its way into socialism or that we can, any longer . . . rely upon poverty and exploitation to drive people, like blind animals, towards socialism. Socialism is, and will remain, an active faith in a new society, to which we turn as conscious, thinking human beings. People have to be confronted with experience, called to the ‘society of equals’, not because they have never had it so bad, but because the ‘society of equals’ is better than the best soft-selling consumer capitalist society, and life is something lived, not something one passes through like tea through a strainer.

Two things are evident in this--as in the rest of the essay--which gives what I think is great insight into what the Thompson and Hall agreed on in this movement. One is that they are connecting their struggle to a much longer one (interpreted through the lens of Thompson's historical account of Morris). And in so doing they prized the democratic process of "populist" discussion above having a clear set of political and theoretical principles which they would address to the people. According to Hall, it was actually the inability to operate a journal in this context--"the editorial board the fear that a journal of ideas could not be effectively run by committees"--which ultimately led him to resign as editor. This is, I think, a telling foible of Hall's--though perhaps one of the more forgivable ones: namely that he prized process over the content of the ideas. At the time, this was a very sensible principle (as he demonstrates by contextualizing it in relation to the left factions vying for control over the dominant narrative.) However, as time went on, it seems to have become a serious liability. His discussion of the CND campaign and the way it became an articulated struggle spanning lines of class and social status is obviously included as a nod to--if not refracted as a memory through--the more prominent understanding of socialist politics adopted at the time he was writing (in 1988) LaClau and Mouffe's hegemony and socialist strategy. (I'll return to this below--especially to LaClau's own more recent idea of how you need to "construct a people."

On the other hand, Anderson's more vigorous approach to making it a serious journal of ideas provides the flipside of this problem: as happy as I am in retrospect that it became such a muscular exercise in theoretical and political discourse (alongside Verso and its earlier iteration New Left Books) it is clear that this divergence made it impossible to carry on with the political engagement that Hall discusses so enthusiastically above--"We have to go into towns and cities, universities and technical colleges, youth clubs and Trade Union branches and—as Morris said—make socialists there."

more here

But equally visible is the reason behind two dominant themes that emerge from this moment--often seen as being opposed in discussions of the New Left and nascent Cultural Studies, but here clearly of a piece with their historical moment. In Hall's description of the need for a new approach at the time, he notes the importance of socialist humanism and the problem of talking about the role that culture was playing in keeping people from thinking about the problems of capitalism. Alienation on the one hand, was a good way of framing this--and the emphasis on "directly living" one's conditions and being active in their creation seems to be the principle that Thompson wants to recommend for getting the people active again. This was needed because, as Hall says, the labor movement had been hijacked to a certain extent by the dominant corporate capitalism. People, in other words, were materially more well off than they had been before. The only appeal from the socialist front had to be the resurrection of some primal sense of anomie at how, despite material comfort, there was less control over the realm of representations and less creativity possible both there and in the workplace (hence the importance of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital as Denning mentioned recently alongside Althusser and Thompson.) Alienation, in this regard, was a strategicly chosen line of critique, admittedly elaborated most fully in the line of the Post-Frankfurt school critic Herbert Marcuse. And, to be sure, much of this was already prefigured (though in much more dour German tones) in the interwar Frankfurt School critique of culture industry and state capitalism.

On the other hand, Althusser was focused less on the stimulation of agency and more on the rigorous elaboration of a theoretical paradigm fit for this new age. In effect, he was not all that interested in the possibility that the economic realm would ever be undermined again--that class consciousness per se would not become prominent because of a direct material change in circumstances. The remoteness of the economy's power (in the last instance), though it was still too close for the critics of economism, shifted the focus to the way the cultural realm was able to secure and reproduce the system despite the remaining inequality and oppression at its heart.

As a tangent, it is worth noting that the economic reinterpretation of Althusser--by what Alain Lepietz calls "the rebel sons of Althusser"--of Regulationist Economics...

In all these sets of ideas, the presumption is that the economic system will remain as it was--that class as a directly experienced difference in relation to either the mode of production or the realities of distribution and opportunity would, for the forseeable future, be less salient than people's feeling of alienation in relation to "the spectacle."

Not entirely true, Jessop (regulationist) vs. hall.

still, worth noting that the fact that the decline of our alienation in relation to the spectacle (i.e. Jenkins) corresponds to the moment when class power is more pronounced than at any time in the 20th century--or at least the second half. In this, the curious fact is that the movement remains unemergent, making Cultural Studies questions all the more urgent even as they realize that one of the basic premises was fundamentally incorrect.

Harvey on class power of neo-liberalism.

“To live under neo-liberalism also means to accept or submit to that liberal bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation. We live, therefore, in a society in which the inalienable rights of individuals (and, recall, corporations are defined as individuals before the law) to private property and the profit rate trump any other conception of inalienable rights you can think of. Defenders of this regime of rights plausibly argue that it encourages "bourgeois virtues," without which everyone in the world would be far worse off. These include individual responsibility and liability, independence from state interference (which often places this regime of rights in severe opposition to those defined within the state), equality of opportunity in the market and before the law, rewards for initiative and entrepreneurial endeavors, care for oneself and one's own, and an open market place that allows for wide-ranging freedoms of choice of both contract and exchange. This system of rights appears even more persuasive when extended to the right of private property in one's own body (which underpins the right of the person to freely contract to sell his or her labor power as well as to be treated with dignity and respect and to be free from bodily coercions such as slavery) and the right to freedom of thought, of expression and of speech. Let us admit it: these derivative rights are appealing. Many of us rely heavily upon them. But we do so much as beggars live off the crumbs from the rich man's table. Let me explain

“I cannot convince anyone by philosophical argument that the neo-liberal regime of rights is unjust. But the objection to this regime of rights is quite simple: to accept it is to accept that we have no alternative except to live under a regime of endless capital accumulation and economic, growth no matter what the social, ecological or political consequences. Reciprocally, endless capital accumulation implies that the neo-liberal regime of rights must be geographically expanded across the globe by violence (as in Chile and Iraq), by imperialist practices (such as those the World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank) or through primitive accumulation (as in China and Russia) if necessary. By hook or by crook, the inalienable rights of private property and the' profit rate will he universally established. This is precisely what Bush means when he says the US dedicates itself to extend the sphere of liberty and freedom across the globe.

“But these are not the only set of rights available to us. Even within the liberal conception as laid out in the UN Charter there are derivative fights such as freedoms of speech and expression, of education and economic security, rights to organize unions, and the like. Enforcing these rights would have posed a serious challenge to the hegemonic practices of neo-liberalism. Making these derivative rights primary and the primary right of private property and the profit rate derivative would entail a revolution in political-economic practices of great significance. There are also entirely different conceptions of rights to which we may appeal—of access to the global commons or to basic food security, for example. ‘Between equal rights force decides’ and political struggles over the proper conception of rights moves center stage to how possibilities and alternatives get represented, articulated and eventually born forward into transformative political-economic practices. The point, as Bartholomew and Breakspear argue, ‘is to recuperate human rights politics as part of a critical cosmopolitan project aimed explicitly against imperialism’ and, I would add, neo-liberalism itself” (56-57).

here more on the issue of rights and the state, culture process etc.